Ancient Vietnam

For more than a thousand years, until the middle
of the tenth century, the region we today call Vietnam lived
under the rule of imperial China, first under the Han
dynasty and then under the T’ang dynasty. Throughout this millennium
of Chinese domination, the Vietnamese people nonetheless maintained
a sense of cultural independence. They even managed several fierce
revolts, although these rebellions were intermittent and never met
with success.

Although Vietnam gained independence from China in 939,
Chinese rule returned under the Ming dynasty, and Vietnam did not become
truly independent until the 1400s,
when the Chinese empire weakened. By the 1600s,
Vietnam was divided between two powerful families. The Trinh controlled
northern Vietnam, with a capital at Hanoi. The Nguyen controlled
the south, including the fertile Mekong River delta, and maintained
a capital at Hue.

French Colonialism

In 1858, as European powers were
scrambling to outdo one another in imperial wealth and power, France invaded
Vietnam. After forcing a peace treaty in 1862,
the French established a colonial government for Vietnam in the
form of a protectorate that the French called Cochin China.
Bypassing the traditional capitals of Hanoi and Hue, they instead
established a colonial capital at Saigon, in the south
of Vietnam. In 1883, France added the more
northerly regions of Tonkin and Annam to its imperial holdings,
and in 1893 combined all their Vietnamese
and Cambodian protectorates with the territory of Laos to form French
Indochina.

A Tradition of Resistance

Because Vietnam was controlled by other nations for so
much of its history, it had a long, violent tradition of fighting
against imperial overlords. These conflicts often lasted for generations,
but in the end Vietnamese resolve always overcame the patience and
resources of conquering powers. With a long heritage of resistance,
many twentieth-century Vietnamese were prepared to fight against
more powerful nations, even if it took decades and exacted a high
cost in human lives.

North-South Disunity

Although much is made of the divide during the Vietnam
War between U.S.-backed South Vietnam and Soviet-backed North Vietnam,
this north-south split actually went back centuries, to the divide
between the northern Trinh family and southern Nguyen family in
the 1600s.
During Vietnam’s periods of independence since that time, its northern
and southern halves frequently faced each other in a kind of civil
war. The split between the communist North and U.S.-backed South
that began in the 1950s
was therefore not purely a result of the United States and USSR
carving out spheres of influence—it was also an echo of a cultural
division that had persisted for generations.

Mixing of Cultures

Although Vietnam fought the Chinese and the French, it
also received profound cultural influences from them. The centuries
of Chinese rule, for instance, brought several varieties of Buddhism that
the Vietnamese adopted widely. Furthermore, the influx of the French
in the late 1800s
brought elements of Western society, many of which Vietnamese culture
had absorbed by the 1950s.
Many Vietnamese elites attended Western-style schools, spoke French more
comfortably than Vietnamese, and were Catholic. Many had also spent
time in Europe, where they were exposed to even more Western cultural
influences than were present in Vietnam.